That culture can make a naturally rich country poor. Unfortunately for its people, the Philippines illustrates the contrary. "The countries that surround the Philippine have become the world’s most famous showcases for the impact of culture on economic development, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore… They have clawed their way to the top through hard study and hard work. "Most of the time I spent in the Philippines, I walked around feeling angry – angry at myself when I brushed off the latest platoon of child beggars, angry at the beggars when I did give in, angry at the rich Filipinos for living behind high walls and guardhouses in the fortified Makati compounds euphemistically called villages, angry as I picked my way among piles of human feces left by homeless families living near the Philippine Navy headquarters on Roxas Boulevard, angry at a society that had degenerated into a war of every man against every man… Joseph Estrada, or better still his mahirap, more than anybody or anything else, spelled out or personified the damage in our culture that Fallows so eloquently depicted. It led to impeachment and People Power II. Until finally his real world – that of sybarite Aristotle Onassis and the shades of Ali Baba – became public knowledge. Estrada verbally warred on the rich of Makati, preyed fastidiously on the "wretched of the earth" in Frantz Fanon’s words. With the other, he did what Luis Chavit Singson said he did and much more. And what you saw made you shiver for the accumulating evidence – many lawyers said – was that he was a first-class crook.Ĭould you imagine? With one hand, he poured myrrh and incense on the poor, and they lapped it up. Erap Estrada had come into our lives, a deus ex machina whose every day in office as president was a page you could light only with a flashlight. For today we are a haunted almost ghostly country, afraid of our own shadows, groping as always for solutions, but groping in the dark, groping like blind men. Let us go back to the essence of what he wrote. But in my insides there crawled ugly currents that Fallows could be right, even as Filipino intellectuals and journalists – left, right and center – jumped on him with a vengeance and called him an ignorant, imposing, imperious Yankee. It was combustible and could lead to a raging controversy. Did she want a rebuttal? No, she said, just leave it alone. I was press secretary of Cory Aquino then, and she had read Fallows’ piece. The American author James Fallows immediately leaped to mind for it was he who first wrote in the Atlantic monthly in November 1987 that the culture of the Filipino was "damaged" almost beyond repair. It brought me back to footpaths that led to the past, earlier writings of mine that I had almost forgotten. It was an event that never happened before, and it burned deeply into my psyche. I have never stopped thinking since that May 1 assault on Malacañang. And they were suckers, with stardust in their eyes. Estrada could hunker down to their level, melt among them, eat with bare hands, speak their language, a ribald and roistering story teller beyond compare who could promise them the moon. He was the phoney Pied Piper who aroused the poor with his magic flute. Maybe – in a very perverse way – we should thank Joseph Estrada for that. Until about 40,000 of our poor from the squalid slums of Metro Manila stormed Malacañang because they could not take it anymore. We strongly argued this explained why Filipinos are the way we are, cursed with infinite patience, able to accept shit even as this gathers at our feet and in our surroundings, hardly ever tossing in the winds of uncontrolled rage over our misery, over our poverty, over our adversity.
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